My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
- Langston Hughes

The river’s edge is where my heart lives
With tattered, prosaic blankets
Where the yarn gives
Away, the fray
Makes up his desk.
It frays like it has before,
But not with the covert intensity
That is placed on my chest this year.

Each fiber weaves through my hair,
Harsh and strident brambles
Their absences are phantom black flowers
Choking tendrils clinging to my soul

I am lying
Where the cardinals warbling
Blends with the rush of the river,
And it wrestles with its clandestine
Divinities that it hides
Only to be cut by the sliver
Of sunlight, an ugly knife
That scars its surface

A broken violin bow,
Playing a sad, opulent song, low
And shaken, blending with the ink
From my pen, a dark and runny sapphire

No one knows that he is my wood,
Solid and rooted deeply wherever I have stood
Tangled and braided, scratching at the pallid
Fabric of gray sky, wrinkled and folded in
But burning at the roots as it buries
Into the house of sin

The roots resemble my hands and feet
Clawing into the pungent earth
Trying to divulge some type of mirth
Instead of garnered purchase, I pause
Choking the ground like
Dragon’s claws

Askew and ancient, the ragged bark peeled
It thumbs and unlocks the lips I’ve sealed
I was a fish, and he’d guided me gracefully
He drinks the turbid water I’d breathed
Giving me oxygen to relieve the burning
In my lungs after they’d seethed.

He has reached into my depths, a curious
Fisherman, or the sliver of sunlight
That declares me too brightly,
For I am an unsightly fiend:
The turbulent waters of shattered words.

He has taken my secrets and crafted
Them better: graceful letters
With surreal urgency
That sparked tears in my eyes
And freed relentless sighs
Held in the envelope of my lips

Carefully, every so often
The thought of him dips
Into those waters,
Placid and empty, cold and bled dry

To breathe life